John Boorman

Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin and featuring Angie Dickinson, adapted from the crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark. Boorman directed the film at Marvin’s request and Marvin played a central role in the film’s development and staging. The film was not a box office success in 1967 but has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.Read More »

Intent on seeing the Cahulawassee River before it’s dammed and turned into a lake, outdoor fanatic Lewis Medlock takes his friends on a canoeing trip they’ll never forget into the dangerous American back-country.Read More »

The General begins with the death of Martin Cahill–celebrated Dublin gangster who stole millions during the 1980s–then literally reverses the approach and assault of his IRA assassin, flashing back in time,back through Cahill’s colorful, criminal quest for his kind of ideal community. Boorman says his Cahill is a throwback to those Celtic chieftains of old who ruled by thievery and violence; as an anachronism, this charming, brutal bear of a man (perfectly incarnated by Brendan Gleeson) is undeniably reprehensible, but he stands in deliberate contrast to the institutionalized hypocrisy and corruption of church, state, and IRA alike.Read More »

Synopsis by Hal Erickson
The Emerald Forest is based on a true story, as related by Los Angeles Times correspondent Leonard Greenwood. Powers Boothe stars as Bill Markham, a US engineer working on a dam project in the Amazonian jungles. Bill’s young son, Tomme (played by director John Boorman’s son Charley Boorman) is kidnapped in the rain forest by a tribe called “The Invisible People” because of their skills at camouflage – a group that has reportedly never experienced contact with Caucasians. Read More »

A shot-down American pilot finds his way to a small, unpopulated island where he hopes to find provisions. He soon discovers that he is not alone; there is a Japanese officer marooned on the island also. Will they continue to fight each other to the death, or will they reach a modus vivendi?

Lone Japanese soldier Toshiro Mifune diligently scans the ocean from his island lookout as he must have thousands of times before, but this time he spies an abandoned life raft resting on a rocky bluff. Within minutes he’s face to face with American sea-wreck survivor Lee Marvin and the two begin an elaborate game of cat and mouse. Director John Boorman presents this two-man war as a deadly game between a pair of overgrown children, who finally tire of it (as kids will) and settle into tolerated co-existence and then even something resembling a friendship. With impressionistic strokes, Boorman paints a lush tropical paradise in colors you can drink from the screen, capturing the texture of their experience as refracted through the cinema: the look of the island as seen through the haze of smoke, the sound of a sudden rainstorm as it hushes the island in a calming roar, the timelessness of life outside of civilization.Read More »

Edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue
Projections is a forum for practitioners of the cinema to write about their work. The first issue includes a journal compiled by John Boorman which records his responses to the events and trends of 1991, and their implications for the future of cinema. Like his Emerald Forest diary, Money into Light, it is a fascinating mix of anecdote, personal reflections, thoughts on the nature of cinema, and comments on the practical business of making films.Read More »

Contents
Foreword by John Boorman, vi
Introduction by Michel Ciment, vii

1 Robert Bresson: L’Argent, I
2 Eric Rohmer: Conte d’ete, 13
3 Claude Chabrol: La Ceremonie, 18
4 Alain Resnais: On connait la chanson, 26
5 Louis Malle: Au revoir les enfants, 33
6 Alain Cavalier: Therese, 51
7 Claude Sautet: Un Coeur en hiver, 64
8 Maurice Pialat: Van Gogh, 70
9 Bertrand Tavernier: Un Dimanche ala campagne, 83
10 Claude Miller: Garde a vue, 93
11 Patrice Leconte: Ridicule, 103
12 Marcel Ophuls: Hotel Terminus, 111
13 Otar Iosseliani: Les Favoris de la lune, 123
14 Olivier Assayas, 132
15 Catherine Breillat: 36 fillette, 138
16 Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Delicatessen, 144
17 Robert Guediguian: Marius et Jeannette, 152
18 Arnaud Desplechin: La Sentinelle, 160
19 Manuel Poirer: Western, 167
20 Jacques Audiard: Un Heros tres discret, 175
21 Mathieu Kassowitz: La Haine, 183Read More »